DON’T LIKE IT? BUY IT

After seven years of pitched battle, it is celebration time for the many people in the Temecula, Rainbow, De Luz and Fallbrook areas who wanted to vanquish the Liberty Quarry project.

Rather than extol the project’s demise, we prefer to praise the triggerman, and point to the broader lesson for policymakers throughout the region.

On Thursday, Tribal Chairman Mark Macarro announced that his Pechanga Band of Luiseño Indians will buy most of the Liberty Quarry site for $3 million, and pay $17.35 million to owner Granite Construction Co. for its trouble and so that it won’t pursue another quarry in the immediate area for 23 years.

In California, where property rights are under siege, the deal is remarkable because it makes so much sense. Here we have an owner, Granite, who wanted to do something the neighbors didn’t like. So one of the rich neighbors, Pechanga, buys the place and makes the problem go away.

This is how markets work to deliver justice. Before we get carried away, however, it is instructive to rehearse the messy history of this optimum outcome.

In 2005, Granite asked regulators for permission to extract 5 million tons a year of sand and gravel, for 75 years, from its property just north of the Riverside-San Diego county line. The proposal touched off a battle of the titans.

Owner Granite Construction is a publicly held company with national operations. Granite argued that trucks delivering its aggregate to freeway and other key projects in San Diego would have dramatically shorter trips, thus reducing traffic, global-warming gases and costs. The company lined up support from labor unions and business groups.

Opposing them was the city of Temecula, along with environmentalists who weren’t persuaded that shorter truck trips in their neighborhood were good for the planet.

Backing the opponents was Macarro, the public face of the ballot initiatives that legalized Indian gambling in California who has presided over the rise of the rich and powerful Pechanga tribe, shoveling millions of dollars of campaign donations to politicians throughout the state.

Macarro declared the Granite site to be firmly within Pechanga’s sacred lands. He hinted at lawsuits, and engineered state legislation that would have outlawed the project.

Temecula sued. The opponents appeared to prevail politically when the county board of supervisors shot down the project by a 3-2 vote in February. But Granite persuaded Chairman John Tavaglione to switch his vote, and the board approved a scaled-down version of the project.

So it was a typically messy, litigious and political process that brought the parties together. And yet, with property owners constantly threatened by environmental lawsuits, zoning changes and legislation, this deal sets an elegant precedent for simple, market-based justice.